All DJ Entries

Car Argument (LUCID)

From the back seat of the car, I'm having a minor argument with my parents. The situation seems a little ridiculous to me, and when my mom leans over to reveal completely gray hair done in a long braid, I'm pretty certain I'm dreaming. After a nose RC, I'm sure of it. Thank goodness I don't have to deal with this argument any more. But as I try to figure out how to get out of here and start working on my dream goals, I realize that I'm waking up. The interior of the car seems to fade into the view of my bedroom from my bed. For instance, my mom's gray hair becomes a fold in my blanket. Well, that's too bad. [Thinking about this now, there's a good chance that that was actually a false awakening. I'm not sure, though.]

Snarl

[This dream was definitely inspired by the series of videos called "The Walls 2" recently recorded by Yogscast on YouTube, which I watched the day before yesterday. It also happened quite late in the morning (for me)--around 10:30.]

We're playing PVP Minecraft in 2-person teams. There are only two teams left. One member of the enemy team is chasing the other member of my team, while I in turn chase him. We run back to my team's base, then we sandwich him between us and kill him with swords. Excellent! Now, the other guy is hiding underneath the ground here. There are lots of holes in the ground and lots of tunnels, and it's all very confusing, so we're not sure how to get him.

We decide to build an enclosed room with a roof and a tower. So my teammate and I sit down with the Legos and start working. I begin by making the tower, which is a really tall wall built from 1x2x1 blue blocks. I get bored with how slowly it's going, so I try just spreading the blocks like I'm extending a folding telescope. It doesn't work, and my friend laughs at me for trying. Anyway, eventually I finish the tower and start working on the other half of the roof.

Suddenly I hear a violent snarl and I feel as though my head's been seized in the jaws of a big, angry dog. The snarl continues as it starts shaking my head back and forth, up and down, like a very erratic vibration. I spend a panicked second trying to decide what to do--is my friend playing a prank on me?!--before I wake up. It feels like the vibrations continue for a moment before they stop. I sit for a minute in shock before doing an RC and confirming that I'm awake.

[It's crossed my mind that maybe that was a seizure, but I doubt it. More likely I imagined it. Either way, it was a strange experience.]

Gaming for Health

An elderly man is playing a video game, because it'll be good for his mental health. It's a story-based FPS: he has to break into a compound and prevent the men inside from setting off a bomb. I'm watching. I hope he does well.

Stuff happens. By the time he reaches the bomb, the timer is counting down from seven or eight seconds--far too little time for it to be defused, especially since there are still people running around trying to shoot him. Instead he dashes over to a small but deep pool (I think it's connected somehow to a nearby lake or river) and dives in. From several feet below the surface, he looks upward to see the air above the water turn red and orange, blossoming with fire. I think that was a good decision: if you can't stop the bomb, at least save yourself. But it was only half a success, so he has to come back tomorrow (in game time, not real time) to try and stop them again.

Somewhere along the line, I start playing instead of the man. As I approach the complex, I see that there's been a flood. Most of the parking lot is covered in water. But as I look more closely, I realize that the pool in front of me isn't very deep: there's still a road under it. So I splash across.

Black Dragon

A girl my age is playing some kind of Minecraft/Skyrim/Portal hybrid. She's opened some portals to travel away from the base of operations to the island where the black dragon sleeps. At first, they're not sure if the beast is there or not, but gradually they realize that they can hear it breathing on the other side of a long, low ridge. They try to carry out their job quietly.

Suddenly the dragon wakes up! The girl dashes back through the portal, knowing that the dragon will be intent on killing her. She goes through a second portal, then pauses to catch her breath in a hillside cave miles away from where she started. She's hidden from view, so it's all but impossible that the dragon will find her here. And yet, with a roar, it soon thrusts its head through the entrance to the cave. It knew exactly where she was. They must be bonded somehow in a way she did not understand. Wasting no time, she runs farther back into the cave, considering taking out her pickaxe to dig even deeper. The dragon will soon reach her, so she decides to go into a dungeon--right into the middle of a battle. Other explorers like her are fighting against a band of skeletons. A couple of the skeletons come at her with swords, and she fights them off. It's dangerous in here, but less dangerous than trying to fight a dragon on your own.

Infiltration with Hank

Hank Green and I run down the hallway towards the room that is our destination. My hands are clasped together with the index finger and thumb pointing out, pretending I'm holding a gun. We reach a T junction.

"I'll take right, you go left," says Hank. We split up.

I see a woman walking down the hallway towards me. I take cover and fire with my "hand-gun." I look away for a moment, and when I look back, she's not there. Just disappeared. I suppose that's what you'd expect an imaginary gun to do. I continue down the hallway until I reach a sort of open area. I can see over the top of some low walls into some rooms where lots of people are working on computers. They seem really focused. I would feel bad about running in there and disrupting them for the sake of this game I'm playing. I hesitate.

Then I see the people in the room on the left looking over towards the room on the right (my target room) and smiling delightedly. Hank must have reached this side of the room. And they aren't annoyed at all! They must have known about the game, and agreed to it because they thought it would be fun. I look over to see what's happening in the right room. There is colorful, fish-shaped confetti flying in the air. The employees are standing around a spot on the floor, jumping up and down, and clapping. Uh oh. I guess they brought Hank down. I should have been in there to help him.

Anxiously, I walk into the room. I ask a tall, dark-haired man what happened.

Later, I'm walking back out of the building, escorted by the building employees. A guy my own age, someone I know, is ranting about a woman who works in this building. She was somehow responsible for ruining our game, and she's also the head of the elementary math education program, even though she hates kids. One of the employees starts looking calculatingly at the ranting guy, and I realize that she must be the woman he's talking about. Uh oh.

Stealing from Nynaeve

I "accidentally" run into Nynaeve and engage her in conversation. Meanwhile, I cleverly steal from her an important artifact. She'll be mad at me when she finds out, but hopefully I'll be ready for her.

I hide the artifact in my locker. I also have a blanket and a cloak of hers, made with cloth of the same pattern. She's managed to take back the cloak, but in order to hide the blanket, I have to rearrange a lot of things in my locker. For instance, I add an extra blanket to my bed and put something else on my desk. A friend comes up to ask me why I changed the color of my blanket.

Missing a Soul

I'm late to orchestra, but before I can go, I need to save my game. But when I try, it tells me that I have no soul. I need to use a soul gem on myself. I try to do so, but when I resume the game, it loads a new chapter, sort of thing. There's a menu that explains the new scenario and a video in the corner where the bad guy is threatening to do something. I don't have time to listen to all of it, so I just click through the screen. I'll look back over it later. I also skip the first objective of the scenario, so I start in the middle of training something called an ADHD. I don't know what it is or why it's important, but apparently it's a creature used by the enemy that we can train to work for us. I'm able to rearrange the letters in "ADHD" in various ways before training it, and presumably that's important. But since I skipped everything, I have no idea how.

Frags:

• I pick my nose, and out comes almost a complete ring of dried boogers. This happens several times in fairly quick succession.

Summer School

On Monday, we have an orientation. Then I go to bed to get rested for classes tomorrow.

For the first day of classes, we have to get in line for some kind of check-in. The line moves slowly, and by the time it's 8:25 I'm still a few places back from the front. My first class is at 8:30, so I think I need to go. I pick up my bags and leave the line, but one of the check-in ladies intercepts me.

"Oh, I'm sorry, did you have an early appointment today?" she asks.

I'm confused, because I don't think class counts as an "appointment," and doesn't every student in this room have class at 8:30? But we go through check-in anyway, and when we're finished, suddenly I remember that I was supposed to set back my watch by forty-five minutes. So I'm actually not late at all. No wonder no one else was worried.

I head to my morning class, thinking I'll be early. But when I get to the room, there are already a lot of people there. What? It's not even 9:00, and this class doesn't start until 10:00! But then I remember that this class is usually MWF, and we couldn't have class yesterday because of orientation. So the professor is squeezing in an extra session on Tuesday morning to make up for it. Hmph. Maybe he ought just have planned to have one less day's worth of material in the course.

The morning class involves a running game where there are a lot of items strewn around a medium-sized room with a grid-patterned floor. Sometimes new items appear in the middle of the grid squares. There are certain items we're looking for, worth more points than the others. We're competing to see who can collect the most points.

The first time I play the game, I think I did pretty well. But it turns out another guy actually won, because he grabbed the items worth the most points. I hadn't even known what those were, but now that I do know, I want to play again. The second time, I notice that there are people stuffed into lockers along one wall of the room, and some of them are worth points. The animation for the game is pretty good, and rather charming.

Now it's time for the afternoon class. I'm skeptical about this one, because the subject seems like total hocus-pocus. I'm not even sure what it is, actually. The professor tells us to take out our textbooks, and the whole class groans. We remember this book from yesterday. The title is completely nonsensical, and by now I'm pretty sure this class will be full of New-Agey crap that doesn't have any business being taught in a university. Good thing I'm sitting in the back.

During class, I notice that the girl sitting on my left is resting her head on my leg and dozing. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, because it's almost like cuddling, and I'm glad she feels that comfortable around me. I'm also amused to confirm that she's just as bored as I am. She notices I've noticed, and she smiles. But it doesn't last too long, because the professor has the class break into groups for discussion and disperse to different rooms.

After discussion, there are still maybe twenty minutes left of class, but I don't feel like going back to the lecture hall. Everyone else leaves the discussion room, but I just spend a long time re-packing my backpack. I'm enjoying being lethargic, but I also hope that the professor doesn't take attendance at the end of class, so I don't get caught.

Later, I'm startled by a student coming into the room. But he's just there to move the front table back to where it was before discussion started. How responsible of him. Anyway, I guess that means class is over. Time to leave.

Seven Keys

A middle-aged man hands a young boy a pistol, warning him never, ever to speak a word of what has been done with that weapon. Presumably it was used to commit a murder of some kind.

In the very next scene, the boy brings the gun to another, older man, telling him mischievously that something terrible has been done with it. When the man asks what, the boy says, "We blue'd it," and takes out another of the same kind of pistol, except this one has been painted blue. Amusedly, the man pretends to be horrified by this action. The idea is that the color blue isn't very aggressive or serious or anything, so it has no business decorating something like a gun.

The boy pretends to aim the gun behind himself, but then coincidentally a spider the size of a small dog comes running into the hallway right where he's aiming. The man's face abruptly becomes very serious. Fighting these spiders is the main purpose of this community, and he says to the boy, "You may fire." But the boy, not having seen the spider, is just confused. Instead, the man lifts his own gun, takes careful aim, and shoots the spider.

Now, I'm in the final stages of a game involving these spiders. The building I'm in has seven levels, and in order to get a good score for the game, I have to collect one key from each level. The trick is that in order to reach the next level, you have to use the key from the previous level, and in the process of using it, you have to leave it behind. So there's got to be some kind of secret passage I can use to go backwards from the end and pick up all the keys. I'm running all over the building trying to find this passage, and I have to restart a few times from a save point near the top of it. There are about five or six other people helping me out with this.

This time, I try using a sort of wooden fire escape on the outside of the building. It's very reminiscent of a treehouse, spiraling around a tree and built entirely out of two-by-fours. There's one other person following me down. On one landing, there's a dead spider, lying in a pool of its own fluids. "Watch out!" I call over my shoulder. "Spider juice!" (It's very dangerous.)

Once on the ground level, I go inside to find a lot of people in a large room. They want something from me; they're expectant that I've gotten the keys; or something. In response, I start taking off my shirts. I'm wearing seven of them, one for each level in the building. But taking them off is actually very difficult. I can't quite seem to pull the first one over my head. A thirty-ish woman, someone I know, asks me what's wrong. I reply that I don't know. I tell her that apparently my arms just feel very tired and I can't muster the force necessary to take off a T-shirt.

[I must have woken up after just about every REM cycle last night. Not sure how I pulled that one off.]

Soiree

Some of my cousins arrive for a function my family is hosting. They brought cupcakes--chocolate and one other flavor. They ask which flavor I prefer, because somehow the arrangement of cupcakes in the baking tin will reflect the seating chart for the event. I reply, "Probably chocolate."

I've agreed to contribute to the evening's entertainment by playing a short (two page) piano solo by Gershwin. I know I haven't played piano in ages, but everything on those two pages looked sightreadable when I glanced over it a while ago. However, when Dad discovers my plan, inexplicably he freaks out. I guess he's really concerned that I'll embarrass myself in front of the relatives. It's annoying, though. In fact, Dad's been annoying me a lot lately. For instance, he's recently gotten it into his head that he should learn to play piano himself, and he expects me to sit down with him to prepare piano duets. That does not sound like fun at all.

The previous group finishes performing, and now it's my turn. I figure the crowd is busy socializing, and they won't mind if I take a minute to look at some of the tougher chords. But to my horror, I open the music and discover a third page. What I thought was the end of the music is just a thin double bar! The third page isn't unplayable, but it has a lot of fast arpeggios over several octaves which will be very, very difficult to sightread. I probably should have taken a closer look at this. I start to feel uncomfortable about the amount of time I've delayed, now; the audience is probably getting impatient.

John Green the Sponsor

I've just finished TAing for today for a two-week class for math teachers in primary education. I and the teacher for the class spend a few moments calculating in percentages how close we are to finishing the class. It's towards the end of the second week.

It's dark outside as I walk through the quadrangles on my way home. On the way, I pass someone who looks exactly like John Green! I didn't know he was in Chicago! But I pass him without getting the courage to ask for an autograph. Mere steps later I consider turning around to chase after him, but I don't.

Inside a building, I run into one of my students from a previous summer math program. We talk for a bit, but we both have to be getting somewhere, so he leads the way out of the building. The building's door is rather heavy, and I feel bad that he tries to hold it for me. The pathway outside is narrow. I follow it into a smallish quad that's packed with people. I learn that it's called "Jones Quad," and it's a popular after-hours gathering place for students. I also know that I've been this way before. A girl from my house waves at me from inside a pack of her friends. I wave back--rather saucily, to my own surprise (namely, by lifting my left hand and repeatedly bending and unbending the last two knuckles of each finger simultaneously). Someone else waves at me, but I don't recognize her, and she makes a disappointed grimace. I run into someone else from my house and we remark upon how many housemates seem to be on campus tonight, despite the fact that it's the middle of summer.

It occurs to me that the John Green I saw might just have been a very close look-alike to the famed vlogbrother. I decide that I should go find him again and look more closely. As I wander around, something weird happens with the lights and the music in the building, and I guess that must mean it's about to close down for the night. No one seems in a hurry to leave, though. When I come back a few minutes later, everyone's still there, though they leave soon thereafter.

Back outside, I walk around a street corner and see a pizza place across the street. On a screen above the building, an advertisement plays. It's this same John Green guy. He's basically sponsoring the pizza place. I guess the pizza company must have heard about the Pizza John shirt and decided to capitalize on it. I still can't decide if the guy is actually John Green, though. It seems unlikely that he would do something so commercial.

Locker Checkout

It's the Saturday after finals week, and I'm trying to do my last bit of packing before going home. I've been storing some stuff in a locker on campus, so I head over to the building to pick it up. To my dismay, the building is locked. Apparently Friday was the last day to remove your belongings from this building. I spend a few minutes mentally cursing the idiot who thought that was a good idea, but then I decide I'd better try to do something about the situation. Using cleverness, I'm able to reach the first of my two lockers, which contains a fairly new car battery. I've been switching this one in and out with my car's old battery. Only, it seems like doing the swap would be a fairly complicated operation, and I can't remember ever having done it before. Oh, well. I must have known how at some point, and it's just been so long that it's slipped my mind temporarily. It'll come back, I'm sure. I put the battery in my backpack.

Unfortunately, the second locker is definitely unreachable. I check the building's hours, and unfortunately it won't open again until long after I've left town. By that time, they'll probably have thrown out my stuff. "My stuff" includes my Tae Kwon Do uniform, so I definitely don't want this to happen. Then I suddenly notice a sign on the window proclaiming the location and hours of this department's interim office. It's open today! Until 4:00! I hurry in that direction, checking the time. It's 4:11. Just my luck. Well, maybe there will still be someone around. My mom hurries to follow me.

I enter my target building to find a stark concrete entryway with stairs going both up and down, and hallways going in a few different directions. For a moment I'm disoriented, until I remember that the interim office is in a basement room. I go down the stairs, which twist and turn a few times before depositing me in a hallway only slightly more furnished than the original one. Along the wall to my right, dozens of cardboard boxes have been haphazardly stacked. Incredulous at my good fortune, I run down the row of boxes until I find one that's been labeled with my initials: last initial first, then first. Opening the box, I find my Tae Kwon Do uniform, along with everything else that's supposed to be there. Well, that's a relief. But I should probably talk to someone before taking it, else they'll think I stole it, and I'll be in trouble when I come back next term.

I continue down the hallway into the interim meeting room, which is actually a concert hall. That's kind of funny, but unfortunately I don't see anyone in the room except a female custodian up on stage setting up the ghost light. I turn back and try searching the hall in the other direction. I manage to flag down a dark-haired woman just on her way out the door. She seems to know me from somewhere, and it turns out she's coincidentally the one who's been answering my questions over email about Study Abroad. She tells me she's not the one to talk to about locker checkout. Fortunately, she says that the right woman to talk to is still in her office; it's right back there in the direction I've been going.

Wading

It's the day after finals week, but some of us are still hanging around to hang out. A girl from my high school class invites me to visit the forest with a group of friends.

"What forest?" I ask. You'd think I'd know the forests around here by now, so I'm a bit embarrassed by my question. Oh well.

She replies with the name of the forest, which I don't recognize. I agree to come anyway, and we head out. Soon after, we enter a restaurant on the outskirts of campus. While we eat, some housemates start planning what they're going to do to earn points for a big school competition which started today. For instance, apparently this restaurant (or the hotel it's a part of) is a sponsor for the event, so you get a points multiplier for eating here. I wonder why it was decided to hold the event after the end of Autumn Quarter, when there are so few people around. Vaguely I recall that it has to do with avoiding conflict with a big Study Abroad event happening in the middle of Spring Quarter, but that still doesn't explain why they didn't decide to do it during Winter. Oh well.

We leave the restaurant. Most of the group is heading back to campus from here, but I take a different path, one that leads toward the forest. At some point, I'll have to cut across the grass. But the grass is actually flooded quite deeply with water. The water's clear, but due to refraction it's difficult for me to tell quite how deep it is. Would this be an okay place to wade across? Tentatively, I start lowering my foot into the water. But even by the time the water reaches the top of my knee-high waterproof boots, I still haven't touched bottom. I retract my foot.

My friends are calling to me from across the water, telling me to go around the way they did. Yeah, their way was probably smarter. Meanwhile a boy from the group that decided to stay on campus is trying to tell me not to wade across anywhere, because it's all too deep. But I don't listen to him, and when I try the route my other friends suggested, the water's only about a foot deep.

All three of us are in werewolf form (from Skyrim) with the silver pelt and claws of an Ancient Behemoth (from Heroes III). I splash up to them and I attempt a growl. It is rather feeble, and one of the girls giggles. I introduce myself to her, and she shakes my hand, although she points out that she thinks we've met before. "No doubt we have," I reply.

Jumping Ahead

My dad and I have been taking turns playing a 3-D platform game while one of my high school friends watches. The gameplay of this game is a lot like rock climbing. You have to move each arm or leg individually, trying not to put too much strain on any one of them for more than a split second. We're trying to get to the top of an outcrop that has a sort of half-enclosed tunnel zigzagging up its vertical face. There's this one tricky spot where you have to jump over a gap, but one of the most attractive handholds actually attaches to a section of rock that swings down on a hinge. It can really upset your balance if you're not careful. Also, in order to get enough height, you need this section of rock to stay in its upright position.

I try it for a while without much luck, then hand it over to Dad. My friend points out that we don't actually have to go up this way; there's an easier place to ascend a little bit farther along this switchback. But I'm kind of stubborn, and I'd just like to prove that it can be done this way, even if it's not what the game's designers intended. Unfortunately, it proves to be a bit too much for Dad, and he falls off the edge to his (cartoon-style) death. That means we have to start over from the beginning of the level, which is frustrating, because I really thought I would get past that section on my next try.

But Dad's bored of this level, so he jumps way ahead in the game to the last level he did on his own. That's his style: don't bother with continuity; as long as you finish all the levels eventually, you're golden. Oh, well. The level selection screen is itself a 3-D environment, and the levels are yellow dots lined up in a path laid out along the ground. He realizes that he needs to buy a new "computer," since he lost the old one when he fell. When he does, the dots change to yellow rings, rather than filled circles. Also, two new "assistants" run in from the side of the screen, get a powerup of some kind from his character, then run off again.

He selects the level he wants. A bunch of enemies start running at him from all sides, so he starts beating them up using combos. Somehow he discovers a new combo--something like "knee in the face, punch, power kick"--which sends the unfortunate recipient flying backwards for about fifty meters. He encourages me to try it, but I have trouble until I realize that I'm doing a regular kick. For a power kick you need to hold down R1 at the same time. I feel a bit overwhelmed, but it's kind of fun once you figure it out. The animation's also cool because my character looks like a Star Wars bounty hunter.

Later, we're part of a larger party in the middle of a battle, trying to help the weaker members level up. This involves passing around 5-foot playing cards from character to character, which we all hug to our sides using our arms. The cards also double as protection from enemy characters, so there's some strategy involved in how you distribute your cards. Unfortunately, I'm running low on cards right now, and a thickset, bald thug is advancing on me in a rather intimidating manner.

Frags:

• dictating to my dream diary in Spanish
• other various false-awakening-dream-journal-writing

Crocodile

I'm playing with a graphics editing program. I'm trying to make a realistic 3-D model of a tree. I've found some textures and random generation algorithms from various other sources, and I'm trying to see how well they can be combined. For example, the models for the fruit on the tree come from Skyrim. Now, I manage to generate a tree. But it's one of those strangler fig trees from the jungle, and the setting is just a basic North American backyard. Also, the branches sometimes have a weird orthogonal slant. I'm not sure exactly how to fix these problems, short of designing my own textures for a tree, and that would be very complicated. I also notice that there's a thin spot in the middle of the tree--not enough leaves there. I spend some time trying to make an extra branch and affix it manually. The patch looks okay from a distance, but when I enter the 3-D environment and rotate the tree by grabbing a branch and pulling it sideways, it's clear that the new branch doesn't quite connect to the rest of the tree. It's just floating in the air in the right general location.

I look over the white picket fence bordering the yard. My parents are visible through the glass doors of the next house. One house over, a big group of 9 or 10-year-old kids is having a pool party. And on the other side of the fence from the pool is a crocodile. Wait, what!? Sure enough, there's a live, fifteen-foot crocodile sort of hanging upside down off of the fence. I'm both terrified and excited by this. In any case I'm definitely going to stay up here in my tree. There's a guy crouching next to the crocodile, but I'm not worried for him. He's probably from animal control or something.

I call out to my parents. "Mom! Dad! Look, it's a crocodile!"

They open the glass door and come outside. "Oh, have they come to pick it up already?" my dad says. I guess they already knew the crocodile was here. Meanwhile, the kids at the pool party are still busy doing cannonballs from the diving board.

Suddenly, the crocodile snarls at my dad. He crouches, but he looks frantic and confused and there's nowhere to run. The crocodile lunges, and Dad trips backwards over a white plastic lawn chair, which falls between them. Then, to my horror, my mom jumps on the crocodile and tries to wrestle with it. "Shit!" I say, desperately. She should have run. I can't see exactly what's going on, because my mom's back is to me. I wonder if I should try to help, or if that would only get me killed as well. Then I see blood and bits of flesh spilling onto the patio. It must have gotten her neck. "Shit," I moan, overcome with horror at the fact that I'm watching someone die, and that someone is my mother. Somehow, I'm on the ground, and her body lands next to me. There's definitely something wrong with the shape of her neck, and there's blood all over. I wake up.

Math Seminar

I'm sitting in the audience for a math seminar. Absently, I look at the speaker for the first time in a while. It takes me a minute to realize that instead of Prof. S, the speaker is a very broad-shouldered man whom I don't know. He looks very strong, he's in shape, and he's not wearing a shirt. Huh. The man explains somewhat embarrassedly that he's advertising for a company whose logo appears on his shorts. Also, I guess he's the substitute teacher for the math seminar, and he's kind of hoping that we won't talk much about math, since he doesn't know much about it.

This is the second half-naked man I've seen in the math department today. I guess the female undergrads must be feeling pretty lucky. Anyway, after the seminar I walk onto the stage and see that the guy's not wearing shorts now, either, or underwear. He's picking up his clothes and getting ready to leave.

At some point later, I discover that I'm wearing only a T-shirt and underwear, and my shorts are around my ankles. I feel somewhat irrationally superior to the substitute speaker in that I decide to pull up my pants, instead of taking off my underwear like he must have done in the same situation. But I do recognize that I'm probably just jealous.

Math Book

One of my friends in the math department leads me into a side room where the floor is covered in dozens of packets of paper, printouts from various mathematical lectures and books. He hands me the printout of the last chapter of the book I've been working through. When I go back and add this chapter to the rest of the book, I take a moment to contemplate the book as a whole. It's in a very rough state: for example, after I add a couple of entries to the glossary at the back, I notice that some of the definitions end with commas, some with periods, and some with nothing. It will take some work to clean up, but I'm still proud of it. I think I understand a little better the essence of a math book. It's not all about the typesetting and the grammar--it's about the content, and content is what we have.

Piano Lesson

Three of us are sitting in a room, waiting. We're all musicians. A friend of ours is having a piano lesson in the next room. The two others decide to rehearse a tricky spot from the string quartet they'll be playing in the recital. I'm a bit uncomfortable with this, since I'm worried about the noise being heard in the next room. It looks like one of the older adults who's back here with us is about to come over and stop them, but then she decides it's unnecessary. I guess if she thinks it's okay, then I'd better not worry about it.

Frags:

• Playing a platform game of some kind.

Car Theft

I'm in a car with my family. I recognize the license plate of one of the cars in front of us--it's one of our own! The car must have been stolen last time my sister took it for a spin, and now we're following the guy who stole it to see where he takes it. I hope he doesn't notice he's being followed. After a while, he pulls into a parking lot off of the highway. We lose sight of him for a bit, but when we pull into the parking lot a few moments later, we quickly spot the place where the car is parked. I jump out of our car and dash towards the thief, quickly followed by my sisters. The thief--a heavyset man with dark hair--tries to run, but we surround him and get into a fistfight. I have a tendency to wind up my punches for a second or two before throwing them. It's dicey for a few seconds, but in the end we subdue him and frog-march him into the building he had been walking towards before we intercepted him. It's a bar or a restaurant of some kind, run by an ugly, middle-aged woman. There's a police officer inside, but she doesn't want to bother with the criminal. She hands me two pairs of handcuffs, so I can take care of it myself. When somebody asks me what's going on, I proudly reply that "This man is under arrest!" I have a bit of trouble getting the cuffs around his wrists. Fortunately there's a button on the side you can press to release the cuffs and try again, and I get it on my third try. As we're leaving, I realize that the woman who runs the place is probably a car launderer of some kind, one of several in the Chicago area, and she might change locations now that she knows the police suspect her.

Churning

Spoiler for Churning:

I trade devices with a girl my age. We're supposed to do thirty iterations with each device, then pass them back. The device I'm currently working on involves moving a wooden dowel in and out of a wooden ring. I decide to count in groups of three thrusts: ONE-two-three TWO-two-three THREE-two three, etc. I realize about five counts in that this means I only need to count to ten. I decide to count to fifteen, just to impress her, but it turns out to be too much, and I wake up messily.

Game Over

While playing a game (very similar to Skyrim), I come across a cave and decide to explore it. Now, I'm not new to this game, so I'm understandably frustrated when I run into some level 2 creatures inside the cave that JUST WON'T DIE, no matter how many times I hit them with my sword. I figure there must be some special weakness these creatures have that I can exploit, so I try using my fire spell. It works! But I'm low on health, so I run back outside anyway. Some of the creatures follow me, but it turns out they're weak to sunlight as well. They remind me of fireflies, burning in the air. I go back inside the cave, where my cousins have already figured out the secret to defeating the creatures, and are nearing the main room of the dungeon.

In order to exploit this weakness for these creatures, I have to travel without any kind of light source. I feel foolish bumping into walls all the time, so I'm happy to remember that I have Night Eye! Quickly, I switch to it on my favorites menu and activate it. Soon, I'm down in the main room with the rest of the party, which consists of about a dozen of my relatives and neighbors, of various ages. There is a row of five deep, dark alcoves on the upper front wall of the room and swiveling mirrors all around the back. The floor is uneven, and it contains lots of concrete buttons for us to stand on, plus one white button we can push. Clearly, it's a puzzle room. I help the party pick up all the loot in the room, then ponder what to do.

I push the white button. A passage opens in the front wall. I'm second through the opening, after one other guy. It opens into a tall hallway with several 50-foot doors along the right side, all draped with translucent plastic tarp. The other guy seems to have run through the first one, and there are terrifying sounds coming from the room beyond--roars, growls, loud crashes, and the clang of steel. After a few seconds, a boss crashes through the doorway, scattering stone everywhere. It's forty feet tall, with a body that swivels all the way around and sharp appendages, claws, and teeth sticking out in every direction. It hurtles down the hallway away from me, but now there are more of the same kind of creature coming out of the doors from further down the hallway. Dozens of them, headed straight for me. I swear there must be some kind of boss spawner down that direction. A boss spawner!

I don't recall exactly how it ended, but next thing I know, we're back in the puzzle room from before the catastrophe. Clearly I was not supposed to push the white button. Presumably we've got to find a light source and reflect it into the correct alcove(s) on the front wall. Nobody else seems to have the patience for the experiment, though, and before long there's only one other person in the room with me, one of my older female neighbors. We exchange a few words, and then I think she leaves as well.

Loading

I'm exploring a large area of the game map with my dad. He walks straight off the edge, though, and seems to be floating in midair. I'm confused. But then the ground beneath him pops into existence, and I realize there was just a loading error in my game client. We find a series of wooden scaffold-like buildings on the side of a cliff. We split up, and I find a sign that encourages me to try "ladder jumping," which I gather means jumping across a gap in a desperate attempt to grab the ladder on the other side. The sign also explains that this ability was a controversial addition to the game, since Assassin's Creed almost has a copyright on that kind of athletic move. But the sign also explains that the addition was justified, somehow.

Atomic Scale

I'm playing a game similar to Heroes III, except sometimes when you hover over certain places on the map, it will tell you that there's progress in the story to be found if you visit that location. I notice I've almost missed one of these, so I go back and visit it. To my surprise, a new area starts loading (like in Skyrim). Once we're inside, the game is in real-time 3D rendering and I'm traveling with a party (like in Baldur's Gate). We're inside. A male voice echoes through the stone rooms, telling us that for our next test, we have been shrunken down to the atomic level, and we must investigate the experiments happening here. It points out a small, cartoonish worm in a hat over by one corner, which is somehow responsible for the orderly functioning of the universe.

The voice also points out an object on the wall, and warns it not to touch it--but we already have. The voice explains that if we do (which we have), water will start attacking a specific member of my party (which it does), trying to cause him to slip into one of the bottomless pits scattered here and there around the building. Certainly, the water makes things difficult for us as we try to make our way down the hallway. I consider re-loading the game, now that I know better than to touch that object. However, in the spirit of role-playing, I decide to try to tough it out. There are other people down here with us, carrying out experiments in side rooms off of the main hallway. I'm not sure whether or not the game is trying to teach us about real-life science.

College Ceremonies

All the students in my year and my house at my school are gathered in a room for a traditional ceremony. Everyone starts by sitting down in desks, but gradually we get up to start dancing at the front of the room. Some people are too embarrassed to join in. Eventually the RHs try to command them to join, but that doesn't really work and it just makes things more awkward. So instead these students are told to get down on all fours and stick their heads inside of a half-scale cardboard model of a car, and start making "moo" noises. That seems ridiculously humiliating to me--hopefully it will make more sense in the context of the larger ceremony. But still, I think certain events have been done out of order. (The female RH seems to agree with me; she looks very uncomfortable right now.) Meanwhile the rest of us (myself included) are given pink roses. We're supposed to crowd around this car as well, so they can take a picture.

Somehow I get confused and lost. I end up in an outer hallway, alone. It takes me a bit to find my way back to the original room, since there are some big windows between rooms that make it unclear where the actual doors are. Once I'm back, I spot a friend sitting at a table, but everyone from my year is gone.

"Are you . . . privy to the plans of the RHs?" I ask her, hesitantly.

She says yes, so I ask her what I'm supposed to be doing right now. She says something about ceremonially dropping the petals of the rose, and suddenly I'm overwhelmed by the symbolism of it all. Without a word, I walk straight back into the hallway, and sit in fetal position, leaning against the left wall. People I don't know are walking past me, but I don't care. After a few moments, I hear my friend come out and sit down next to me. I feel a bit ashamed to realize that that's exactly what I wanted to happen. She asks what's wrong, and I start moaning about not knowing the point of this ceremony or of life in general. I know I should try to be more mature, but I guess I just hope she'll solve all my problems for me. But no, she refuses to be cast in that role. Without a word, she gets up and walks back into the room. I notice that she somehow walks through one of those glass windows that confused me so much before. I walk up to the window and test it for myself. It turns out there's not a window there at all. Weird.

Mock Warm-Up

I'm warming up with an athletics club. The instructor is leading us in dynamic exercises back and forth across a stretch of lawn outside. He asks us now to go the entire distance in just two one-legged hops. Bit of an absurd request, but we do it anyway, no problem. Somehow this particular stretch is a parody of a recent Olympic sprinter who thinks a bit too much about himself. We laugh. Later, we're given a rather complicated series of exercises that we're supposed to repeat for a while on our own count, though we're still supposed to stay together as a group. Somehow I notice that I've gotten ahead of one of the two other guys still exercising, so I wait with the third guy while the second catches up. This exercise will be more impressive if we do it together.

I have never ever EVER EVER EVER played an xbox before. I own nintendo stuff which is boring... anyways

I was in a warehouse. People were in army uniforms armed with guns. I walked around a bit until I realised I was in a video game! Someone came up to me and explained how to control my character. He gave me and gun and wished me good luck. I survived one map by just wandering around. The next map was in central park. Some noooob kept jumping and I couldnt hit him. I threw a knife at him and got points or something. i don't know. My friend jocelyn walked up to me with her character and handed me a remote control. That's when the dream transitioned

I was at an amusement park that felt like Knott's. My friends and I slid down a huge yellow slide and walked up to a ride with swings that twirled in the air. And that's it

Awake - Dream - Lucid

I haven't been writing in this for awhile because I haven't been able to recall anything at all. I know I should write my thoughts each night as well but I don't see the need to write that I didn't recall anything. I've been pretty distracted with playing Grand Chase lately. They've added a ton of stuff since Tony and I played a little over a year ago so we were enjoying the new content. I also stopped doing things like drinking Apple Juice (was making me sick), practicing ADA, and questioning reality regularly. I've been a little caught up in the game and I'm going to start trying harder now. I know I can do it.

I was up watching My Little Pony till 4AM. After forcing myself back awake several times from almost passing out with my iPod in my hand, I went to sleep.

I'm not sure where I was. It was a small room with around 5 people lounging around in it. I was talking with my buddy Jermey about my other friend, James. I was asking him things like, "Why don't we hang out more" and "What games are you in to now". Jermey was telling me how him and James were bros and I responded, "Yea he told me a couple times". He was telling me how he was bad ass in some new game now. I don't remember the name but it was some kind of hunting game. Then him and I were playing some kind of Alien game together. He was tearing threw the Aliens with an AK74u. We were near the end of the level which was located in a small cave. Inside the cave was some scaffolding on the side for us to get on and aim and a purple Alien ship near the back. We were shooting the cheap out of them before they could even get out of the door. Then out of no where, Jermey paused the game and we had to go kill ants. We were micro sized and had to kill a bunch of ants that were trying to steal all our stuff. They were carrying white chess pieces for some odd reason.

Interpretations
I'm positive this dream is the collection of thoughts that I have very often. That is, where did all my friends go? I used to have friends over every week and we'd play games together. I was the guy you'd come kick it with if you wanted to play that latest video game before anyone else. Now I literally only have one friend I talk to and I miss the people I used to hang out with.

I remember very little about this one, simply that it was Kingdom Hearts related. Probably because I'd beaten Kingdom Hearts 2 at my friend's house the night I had the dream.

I can't remember this one too clearly. I didn't sleep all that well.

There was some sort of fighting game - it was like a cross between Super Smash Bros. and Marvel vs. Capcom. I was seeing it as if I was in the game itself, and I can't remember if I was actually playing it myself or if I was only watching.

The first match I remember was Sentinel vs. some other random person, and Sentinel won. The next one was Captain Falcon vs. Yoshi on a beach level of some sort. Before the fight could start, some special condition started where Yoshi became stuck in an egg, and there was a sort of shelf out on the water with more eggs on it. Some were hatched, some weren't, and some spots were just empty. The condition had something to do with -teenth numbers (nineteenth, seventeenth, etc.).

I don't remember any more of this dream, because I woke up shortly after this part.